Loyalty without truth
is a trail to tyranny.
|
a middle-aged George Washington
|
|
Sunday, 22 October 2006 at 20h 35m 39s | Bill Maher rips the stupidity of Think Tanks | Click here.
Bill Maher rips into the stupid predictions that never came true about the war
in Iraq
If you're someone from one of these think tanks that dreamed up the Iraq War
and who predicted that we'd be greeted as liberators, and that we wouldn't need
a lot of troops, and that Iraqi oil would pay for the war, that the WMD's would
be found, that the looting wasn't problematic, that the mission was
accomplished, that the insurgency was in its last throes, that things would get
better after the people voted, after the government was formed, after we got
Saddam, after we got his kids, after we got Zarqawi, and that whole bloody mess
wouldn't turn into a civil war ... you have to stop making predictions.
Thanks to CrooksandLiars.com for the footage.
| Saturday, 21 October 2006 at 4h 24m 55s | The real John McCain |
I used to respect John McCain. But now ... I realize he's just another craven
politician.
Here is a snippet of his "strained" interview with (of all people) Chris
Matthews ( of whom some people refer as Tweety) :
[SOURCE]
MATTHEWS: Let me ask you about an area where we‘ve all been involved, you
especially, in talking about Iraq and how we can win this war or deal with it.
You‘ve called, just in the last couple of days, for 100,000 more troops on top
of the 140,000 we have as a compliment there.
When I read that on the clips this morning, I went to General Barry McCaffrey,
whom you know so well, and he said we‘ve got only a total of 19 brigades that
we could actually put into combat right now. We have 17 committed, two of those
brigades to Afghanistan, 15 brigades already in Iraq. He says we simply don‘t
have the capability to sustain another 100,000 troops in Iraq. You disagree?
MCCAIN: I said we need 100,000 more ...
MATTHEWS: Right.
MCCAIN: ...members of the Marines and the Army. We need additional troops
there, but I think we need to expand the Army and the Marine Corps by 100,000
people.
MATTHEWS: More recruitment.
MCCAIN: I didn‘t say we need 100,000 -- more recruitment. And by the way, I‘m
sure that people in this audience know the members—many members of the Iowa
National Guard. They have served with courage, with bravery, with sacrifice and
enormously wonderful performance. But it‘s a heavy strain on the Guard.
MATTHEWS: Would they please stand up? I know we have some here. Would the
people of the National Guard of Iowa please just stand up nonofficially here?
Thank you.
(APPLAUSE)
MATTHEWS: Thank you. Thank you for your service.
(APPLAUSE)
MCCAIN: Some of these young people have been to Afghanistan or Iraq two or
three times already. We have put an enormous strain on them. They have
performed magnificently, but we can‘t keep it up. We‘ve got to expand of the
Marines. . . .
MATTHEWS: But why isn‘t it working? I mean, so few people here— we‘ve got a
couple of thousand of young people here, and a very, very small percentage have
expressed a commitment, even by standing here. Doesn‘t that mean we might have
to think of the draft again?
MCCAIN: I don‘t think we need to think of the draft again because I don‘t think
it makes sense in a whole variety of ways. But I guarantee you, if these young
people felt that this nation was in a crisis and we asked them to serve,
virtually every one of them would stand up because I have the greatest
confidence in the young people of America.
So ... , uh, what the hell is John McCain saying? I think the picture above
says everything ?
| Saturday, 21 October 2006 at 4h 15m 46s | Holy Shit | Whoa baby look at what's happening now/
Baltimore Sun Source
Diebold Election Systems Inc. expressed alarm and state election officials
contacted the FBI yesterday after a former legislator received an anonymous
package containing what appears to be the computer code that ran Maryland's
polls in 2004.
Cheryl C. Kagan, a longtime critic of Maryland's elections chief, says the fact
that the computer disks were sent to her - along with an unsigned note
criticizing the management of the state elections board - demonstrates that
Maryland's voting system faces grave security threats.
. . .
The disclosure comes amid heightened concerns nationwide about the security of
the November elections and the ability of the state to keep tight controls on
the thousands of machines that will be used next month.
Maryland's September primary - which used voting machines and electronic check-
in equipment made by Diebold - suffered a series of mistakes, and the outcomes
of some contests were not known for weeks.
A legislator gets an anonymous package which proves that Diebold machines had
preconceived intentions of fraud ?
| Saturday, 21 October 2006 at 1h 57m 1s | My fears of the ignorance | I do hope we are all getting an education. I don't think many
people
read at
all, and so what information they ever get is mostly from the video and audio
media.
Imagine a people who have no idea what happened 30-40-50 much less 300 years
ago. Much of history is something a whole hell of a lot of people have never
even conceived of, except when alluded to by some external media source, or in
conversation with other people. I mean if you don't know what happened in 1910
or 1804, what would you think about if you pondered it? What notions would fill
the void of the empty receptacle?
This is hard for me to imagine because I have been reading since the age of 3.
I was writing and drawing at age 5. I started playing guitar and piano in high
school, and now, many years later ... I suppose I'm probably what you might
call a child progidy.
But still, I know that other people are different, and frankly I am sometimes
catatonic when I think of how little the average person reads in a month. I
mean a lot of persons are vulnerable to the spin and propaganda, because they
are just too ignorant too know any better. They often have good intentions, but
like most human beings will get their hackles up and become quite defensive
when challenged.
Now I'm not speaking of the bots and spin merchants who vomit all over the
media and blogosphere.
Those fools are just hybrid rodents chewing on their fingers.
God Save The Republic.
| Friday, 20 October 2006 at 0h 36m 49s | Listen to yo grandma | I thought I'd share this with everyone.
We've been had.
We struck a match across the entire Middle East.
[We] not only failed, we created a civil war.
We did exactly what the British said we were doing, we fixed the facts around
the policy because the President wanted to go to war.
They've been cut off at the pass, because they don't understand one thing :
people fight for their country. I mean what else are they gonna do, where
else are they gonna go.
We are only compounding the problem.
-- quotes from Helen Thomas, the David Bender show, 19 October
2006
I love Helen Thomas, the 80 something veteran journalist. Listen to your
grandmother boys.
| Thursday, 19 October 2006 at 3h 8m 29s | Progress is right around the next.... | Bottomless pit of corruption.
This is the average hours of electricity in Baghdad from 2005 to 2006. Baghdad
is a modern city of 10 million people. Prior to the invasion, there was an
average of 16 to 24 hours of electricity per day.
[SOURCE]
And now ...
| Tuesday, 17 October 2006 at 2h 55m 12s | Saving the elephant |
Thanks to bartcop.com
| Tuesday, 17 October 2006 at 0h 50m 46s | Paul Krugman today | I was just blogging about this event, and lo and behold, Paul Krugman mentions
it too in his op-ed column today.
The current Congress has shown no inclination to investigate the Bush
administration. Last year The Boston Globe offered an illuminating comparison:
when Bill Clinton was president, the House took 140 hours of sworn testimony
into whether Mr. Clinton had used the White House Christmas list to identify
possible Democratic donors. But in 2004 and 2005, a House committee took only
12 hours of testimony on the abuses at Abu Ghraib.
| Tuesday, 17 October 2006 at 0h 46m 44s | Hypocrites and conflicts of interest | Click here for the full story in the Houston Chronicle
WASHINGTON — Former FDA chief Lester Crawford has agreed to plead guilty to
charges of failing to disclose a financial interest in PepsiCo Inc. and other
firms regulated by his agency, his lawyer said Monday.
The Justice Department accused the former head of the Food and Drug
Administration in court papers of falsely reporting that he had sold stock in
companies when he continued holding shares in the firms governed by FDA rules.
Conflict of Interest is nothing new to the Rethuglicans. Louisiana Republican
Billy Tauzin, left Congress and was hired for 7 figures as a lobbyist for a big
Pharma medical lobby group -- just after he orchestrated the Medicare --cough
cough -- Reform Act of 2004. Don't you think he got "pay back" ?
It's called the Government to Industry revolving door. After doing
favorable things or making favorable interpretations of the law, one goes from
being a congress person or government employee to getting hired at top dollar
to be a consultant or lobbyist for the corporations and their lobby agencies.
Vice President Dick Cheney is the perfect example, where Cheney goes back and
forth from private industry to government a number of times in 30 plus years
time. It began in, of all places, the Nixon administration, continued as a
consultant for the oil industry, then he was a congressman from Wyoming, then
defense minister, then top CEO of Halliburton, and then finally Vice President.
Granted this is a vast over-simplified timeline, but it works for the point I'm
clarifying. If you want more info, you need to read.
Click here for a Mother Jones article that details some of
the long sordid history of Cheney's travels through the revolving door. Click here for a list of various sources for more articles
about Dick Cheney
Click here for plenty more
examples.
Just like Supreme Court justices Antonin Scalia and Samuel Alito both refused
to recuse themselves before court cases even though they had blatant conflicts
of interest. In Alito's case, he had investments with Liberty Financial at the
same time the company was being litigated in his Massachusetts court. Scalia's
son (
Eugene Scalia ) was appointed to direct a bureau of the
labor department so he could gut worker safety rights after the 2000 election.
The son Eugene "has said that employees should pay for their own safety
equipment, when the equipment is required by law" ( source ). The father Antonin Scalia, spent the weekend
hunting ducks with Dick Cheney one month before Scalia was to oversee the
Cheney Energy Documents legal battle. Incidentally the case took an interesting
turn. Click here to read the excellently written findlaw.com
summary of events by John W. Dean.
Ask yourself, is it proper for the judge to spend a close personal bonding
event hunting over the weekend with the defendent one month before the trial,
and then attempt to exonerate that defendent? Scalia went ballistic when a
reporter asked
him this question, angrily defending his right to be impartial and having
security take the reporter's camera away because Scalia didn't want digital
evidence.
This is the man who is chief justice of the supreme court.
Now I remember when the Rethuglican's stromed the bastille when it was rumored
that Lobbyists were buying access to the Christmas card list of the Clinton's
White House (later proven untrue) or when the White House Travel Office was
seen as "graft ridden" or (according to Wikipedia )
The White House Travel Office is in the residential section of the White House,
and as such, staffers serve strictly at the pleasure of the president.
Historically, a change of administrations usually resulted in a brand new
Travel Office staff. Despite the established presidential privilege of
replacing staffers at will, Congressional Republicans alleged that friends of
President Bill Clinton, including his cousin Catherine Cornelius, had
engineered the firings in order to get the business for themselves.[1] The
House Government Reform and Oversight Committee eventually launched an
investigation into the White House Travel Office firings. After a three-year
investigation, the Chair of the committee, Pennsylvania Republican William
Clinger, accused the Clinton administration of having obstructed the
committee's efforts to investigate the Travelgate scandal. [2] Clinger also
challenged the White House access to Billy Dale's FBI records in the Filegate
affair. [3] Ultimately, a president's right to staff his residential
quarters with persons of his choosing prevailed and no grounds for legal action
could be established.
Bill Clinton later described the allegations and investigation as "a fraud".[4]
Now these false accusations got splashed across the front-page of the corporate
newspapers, but buried the eventual proof that there were no grounds for legal
action in the back pages -- if ever mentioned at all. How can this be ? Don't
we have a "free" press?
Sure we do, and a large multinational holding company that owns hundreds of
media companies is free to do and print what it wants. It's just that ignorant
people may be what the huge financial interests want. Right now, news media
companies like newspapers and local television and radio are getting bought up
and downsized so the mother holding company can suck more money and make more
profits. If this diminishes the quality of news, so what. The monopoly on ad
space still ensures lucrative ad sales, even if the circulation and audience
shrinks. Excessive profits are more important than journalism.
A book I suggest to everyone about this rise of corporate consolidation in the
news media is written by two 35 plus year veteran's of the Washington Post.
It's called the News About the News. Get yourself a copy.
As for the recent wave of corruption due to conflicts of interest, how come
these same Rethuglican's can't seem to apply the same vociferous indignation
when it comes to actual illegal action by their own. Republican Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma actually says he's "outraged about
the outrage" ?
Isn't that despicable?
| Sunday, 15 October 2006 at 21h 58m 27s | John Murtha, shoots from the hip | John Murtha has op-ed in the Washington Post this weekend. Click
here
Here is the last 30% of his heartfelt piece.
The United States is about to begin its fifth year of occupation and fighting
in Iraq. That makes this war longer than U.S. participation in World Wars I and
II, and longer than the Korean War and our own Civil War. With every year of
occupation, our efforts to fight global terrorism and our military's readiness
to fight future wars have further deteriorated, along with our standing in the
world. Meanwhile, the radical Islamic cause wins more and more recruits.
Despite the presence of more than 140,000 U.S. troops in Iraq, 23,000 Americans
injured or killed, tens of thousands of Iraqi deaths and the expenditure of
nearly a half a trillion dollars, here are the dismal results:
In September, 776 U.S troops were
wounded in Iraq, the highest monthly toll
in more than two years.
Over the past year, the number of
attacks against U.S. personnel has doubled,
rising from 400 to more than 800 per week.
Zalmay Khalilzad, the U.S.
ambassador to Iraq, recently acknowledged that
sectarian violence has replaced the insurgency as the single biggest threat to
Iraq.
In the past two months, 6,000
Iraqis died, more than in the first year of the
war.
Last week, electricity output
averaged 2.4 hours per day in Baghdad and 10.4
hours nationwide -- 7 percent less than in the same period in 2005.
A Sept. 27 World Public Opinion
poll indicated that 91 percent of Iraqi
Sunnis and 74 percent of Iraqi Shiites want the Iraqi government to ask U.S.-
led forces to withdraw within a year. Ninety-seven percent of Sunnis and 82
percent of Shiites said that the U.S. military presence is "provoking more
conflict than it is preventing." And Iraqi support for attacks against U.S.-led
forces has increased sharply over the past few months, from 47 percent to 61
percent.
Now, Karl Rove may call me a defeatist, but can anyone living in the real world
deny that these statistics are heading in the wrong direction? Yet despite this
bleak record of performance, the president continues to stand by his team of
failed architects, preferring to prop them up instead of demanding
accountability.
Democrats are fighting a war on two fronts: One is combating the spin and
intimidation that defines this administration. The other is fighting to change
course, to do things better, to substitute smart, disciplined strategy for
dogma and denial in Iraq.
That's not defeatism. That's our duty.
|
GOTO THE NEXT 10 COLUMNS
|
|
|